The ChangingMinds Blog!

Thinking about death

It's not something we do too much of. Even though we know we will die some
day, we tend to ignore this and act as if we are going to live forever. In our
deep need for identity, the
thought of not existing is so painful we blot it out. Yet sometimes we have to
think about death, most typically when somebody we care about dies. We look at
the coffin and wonder, 'Where did the person go?' And we shudder at
thoughts of our own mortality and hope to get out of there as soon as is decent.

I have seen something of death, as my mother and elder sister each died
slowly of cancer, knowing that the end was in sight. My sister managed it very
well. She separated death from dying, reasoning that while dying may not be too
comfortable, she would either not experience being dead or be in some kind of
heaven.

A typical response to being faced with death is to become more religious. In
times of war, pestilence and other great threat, people flock to churches and
pray hard for life. Jessica Tracy and colleagues did some interesting research
that showed the way that thoughts of death changed people's thoughts of God. In
particular, the idea of Intelligent Design appealed more (and the ideas of
evolutionary theory less). The basic ID reasoning that the order in the universe
can't have just happened, so there must be some intelligence
behind it all.

Most, but not all, people are swayed by thoughts of death. The people who
Jessica Tracy found kicked back hard were those trained in the natural sciences.
Their beliefs in science had been so deeply embedded by their training that they
saw ID as a threat, even when considering their own mortality.

I've long held the view that if God exists, it's not as an old chap on a
cloud, but something beyond my understanding. So it would be a bit arrogant to
deny the possibility of him/her/it existing. Yet by the same reasoning, it would
also be rather arrogant to believe that I understood God. I also do not make
direct correlation between God and death. The existence of a greater
intelligence does not mean I will survive (in whatever form) after death.

Yet I also know that my views are not necessarily true as, ultimately, truth
is a personal construct. Belief
is assumed truth, and we each have the capacity to assume. And all this rambling
is perhaps just another
displacement,
intellectualizing about beliefs in order to avoid thinking about death. My
belief about death is that it is life's last great adventure. As I shuffle off
these mortal coils, if I still have some form cognitive functioning beyond brain
death, it'll be a new journey of understanding. And if there's nothing there,
then as my sister concluded, that won't be a problem either.